Opera owns fastmail.fm. fastmail.fm could be seen as competition to Gmail. Related?
Google Service Drops Support for Opera
81–90 of 105 posts
Re: Google Service Drops Support for Opera
#82Worry given of all the browsers Opera has been the most standards compliant. No reason why Google can't support it as by supporting other browsers they supoprt Opera and with that if you change the browser ID then it just works - funny that. I Have noticed that Facebook have been bashing google indirectly and directly and maybe Opera are deemed part of Facebook now for some reason and got dragged into this. I have al…
I'm not sure what you mean by the last sentence, but despite rumors, Facebook has not bought Opera. I highly doubt Google would punish Opera because they might be bought by Facebook.
I don't know about google but I "punished" them already when I heard they're looking to sell and the buyer might be facebook. I doubt it's just me.
Opera is not open source, they distribute only binaries. If the new buyer stuffs it with rubbish you don't want, there's nothing you can do about it other than switch. Might as well switch to chrome and learn to use chrome's developer tools when I'm not in the middle of something.
Of course, I will continue to test anything I make on Opera, it's just been dropped as my primary browser.
Re: Google Service Drops Support for Opera
#83Opera owns fastmail.fm. fastmail.fm could be seen as competition to Gmail. Related?
I would think Fastmail is fairly insignificant to the Google thinking. My guess is they are most interested in the mobile presence, especially as Opera are moving further into advertising. Also they would probably like to see them generally weakened so a competitor can't use them as a entry point such as Facebook recently attempting to purchase Opera.
Re: Google Service Drops Support for Opera
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While Google has the resources to support Opera, it's not financially prudent to dedicate them to support a browser that barely has any market share. Really? How much do you think it costs to make Blogger work on Opera?
Including testing, support, development, translation into various languages, overhead, meetings when fixes conflicts? I would shoot at an average of 100k per feature. Plus more in the future to keep the support when they add new features.
Considering that Opera is religiously standards compliant, anything that renders properly on Chrome should also render properly on Opera. (Assuming Google isn't invoking some kind of undocumented chrome-specific functions we don't know about for some reason).
They can 'drop support', okay, fine, it's their choice what browsers they target. I just hope they don't start sniffing for the user agent and actively blocking it.
Re: Google Service Drops Support for Opera
#85I really want to like opera....it tends to be a memory hog (at least for me) and it tries to do too many things. In any case, if they open sourced the software it might see more adoption.
Opera does not take a lot of dev work at all. I do like some of the dev tools (unlike firefox - excluding firebug).
I could never get opera to work properly on Google Apps. Lets be honest, it's not like google made an effort to begin with.
I just find this kind of odd. It's kinda like when Microsoft thought it was too hard to support Firefox on msn.com. Look how that turned out.
Re: Google Service Drops Support for Opera
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't Google give up on IE6 for some of their services when it had less than 20% market share? Opera has 1-2% market share. Granted, it should be a lot easier to tweak their code for Opera, but the difference in market share is pretty big, too.
>Granted, it should be a lot easier to tweak their code for Opera In fact, most things would just work in Opera as they do in the other browser if there weren't any Opera-specific sniffing code in place locking Opera out.
If that's literally true then isn't this not really a problem? Opera has a user agent switcher built in, no?
Re: Google Service Drops Support for Opera
#87This whole "supporting browsers" thing should be gone, and very soon. There are specifications that browser makers should follow, and if they are all supporting those specifications, then they well be well-supported. The only differentiator between page rendering among browsers should really be speed. (I believe Opera is actually one of the browsers that adheres most closely to the specs.)
However, Opera scores 338+9 on html5test.com while Chrome gets 414+13.
Re: Google Service Drops Support for Opera
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You're joking, I hope? No. No im not. >Of course Google has the resources. It's one of the biggest companies in tech. I didn't say they lacked the resources, I said it wouldn't be fiscally prudent. They are not purposively preventing opera from working, they are just not fixing bugs that only show up in Opera. >But it has very high market share in a few countries in Europe. Not supporting Opera is basically saying t…
How much - in actual dollars - do you think it costs them to support Opera, the most standards-compliant browser of them all?
If you're the only one that adheres to a standard, then there might as well not be a standard.
Re: Google Service Drops Support for Opera
#89Go Opera! Go!
How would one buy a computer in East Europe?
You go to some PC shop (the vast majority of them were not in a chain of shops, just one guy selling PCs in one area and that's it). You barely had enough money for the machine so nobody was buying software. Anyway, the shop owner (a technical person) knew that it can't work unless he installs some OS. So Windows was installed for free. They could also install some other software for a small fee (the fee was for the work to install it and not for software), or you could buy CDs with software. When they installed software they would usually install the best there was (because anyway, nobody was paying for it so why not?). That meant best software in the category and the latest version of that software. For browsers that meant Opera.
How did you fix the PC?
You just get you technical friend to do it or the shop owner that sold you the PC. When these people would see that you still use IE they would (start to cry and) immediately install what they used: Opera.
So Opera adoption was driven by technical people installing, repairing PCs.
Why it's not so popular elsewhere?
Marketing. MS was telling you how to get on the internet in ads. Firefox was fighting a big monster in articles. I don't recall seeing either for Opera at the time.
Re: Google Service Drops Support for Opera
#90This whole "supporting browsers" thing should be gone, and very soon. There are specifications that browser makers should follow, and if they are all supporting those specifications, then they well be well-supported. The only differentiator between page rendering among browsers should really be speed. (I believe Opera is actually one of the browsers that adheres most closely to the specs.)
> This whole "supporting browsers" thing should be gone, and very soon. There are specifications that browser makers should follow, and if they are all supporting those specifications, then they well be well-supported.
The problem is that those specifications have become so insanely complex that it has become impossible to either write them without any ambiguities or to implement them without any bugs.
Hell, most of those "specifications" wont be fully finished for years to come, and the implementations wont be feature complete for years either, and still, whole new specifications are huge sets of features keep being added all the time (WebGL, I'm looking at you, but there are more coming) before the existing ones can work well.